Deeplinks Blog posts about No Downtime for Free Speech

In a win for online fair use and the free speech it makes possible, a federal district court judge has ruled that using a campaign headshot as part of a critical, noncommercial blog post does not infringe copyright.

In the week leading up the two-year anniversary of the SOPA blackout protests, EFF and others are talking about key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day, we'll take on a different piece, exploring what’s at stake and what we need to do to make sure the law promotes creativity and innovation. We've put together a page where you can read and endorse the principles yourself. Let's send a message to DC, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Brussels, and wherever else folks are making new copyright rules: We're from the Internet, and we're here to help.

For several weeks now, former Navy chaplain and Colorado Assembly candidate Gordon Klingenschmitt has been on a campaign to shut down the YouTube account of People for the American Way's Right Wing Watch (“RWW”) project. RWW reports and comments on the political views of folks like Klingenschmitt, using their own words. As we all learned in Writing 101: show, don’t tell.

Klingenschmitt apparently doesn’t appreciate the criticism those clips engender, so he’s been using false copyright claims to get them taken down. Now, with help from EFF and Hogan Lovells, PFAW is fighting back, demanding that Klingenschmitt end his campaign.

The abuse of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's notice-and-takedown process to silence lawful speech is well-documented and all too common. Far less common, though, is a service provider that is willing to team up with its users to challenge that abuse in court.

That’s what WordPress.com's parent company, Automattic, Inc, did today and we couldn’t be more pleased. Represented by Durie Tangri, LLP, Automattic has joined twolawsuits in federal court under Section 512(f) of the DMCA. Section 512(f) is the provision that allows users to hold people accountable when they make false infringement accusations.